Kyle Nabilcy
There are a lot of good beers out there, and a lot of good beer festivals, and a lot of taster glasses to put festival beers into, but I get that Great Taste of the Midwest glass in my hand for the first time each summer, and I am fully in my Happy Place. It’s the best. There’s just no better way to drink a bunch of tiny beers.
As you probably know by now, the Great Taste is held annually on the second Saturday of August. The tickets are appropriately challenging to get, and the only eligible beers are those brewed in the Midwest. It’s a rain or shine event, and this year was so, so much shine.
My wife and I hosted friends from out-of-state again this year, and met up with our usual crew of local friends at the park, and set up our base camp in a shady corner of Olin Park over by the Real Ale tent. As with previous years, I had a backpack full of limburger sandwiches — all of which were given away to those who supplied a Pulp Fiction quote. The rest of the day is beer.
After dropping off our chairs at base camp, I admit I’m pretty hyped on my initial cruise into the tent area. Blew right past Tent 100, and stumbled upon Chicago’s Haymarket right at the end of Tent 200. Lo and behold, Clare’s Thirsty was just sitting there waiting to be poured, and thus was my first 2017 Great Taste beer a 10.5% ABV barrel-aged imperial raspberry stout. That’s how it goes sometimes, smiling shrug emoji.
Stouts turned out to be my jam this year, comprising over a third of all the beers I tasted. I had a tiny, tiny shared sip of Bell’s Black Note and Revolution’s Very Special Old Deth, which were pretty great. El Ganador, Central Waters’ coffee and cocoa nib stout aged in tequila barrels, doesn’t sound like it should work, but it really does.
The Cafe Con Leche version of Lagunitas’ High-Westified Imperial Coffee Stout was tasty enough, but an example of subtraction by addition; the regular version is just so good, while the added vanilla and lactose were a distraction. I didn’t need to, but I got a pour of The Wolf from 3 Sheeps because it was relevant to my Pulp Fiction theme, and also because it’s really truly great, an honest-to-god stout in a brewery barrel-aged lineup full of dark wheat ales.
Hailstorm Brewing, wedged into the southern end of Chicagoland between Joliet and Lake Michigan, was on my radar for the panoply of adjunct variants on its Vlad Russian Imperial Stout. It was on a lot of radars, in fact, judging by the line. Best part of going to Great Taste with friends, though, is doing the cooperative thing and each getting a different pour on one trip through the line.
Maple Vlad? Excellent, unimpeachably maple. Vanilla Vlad? Actually kind of subtle, which is weird for vanilla stouts (but still good). Raspberry Vlad was the real killer, even scoring higher than the pour of Clare’s Thirsty I had enjoyed earlier. With our final sips, we blended a pretty stunning little cuvée, kind of a Melted Ice Cream Sundae Vlad. Nailed it.
Normally I put away a lot of sour and wild ales at Great Taste, but only tried a handful this time around. A fresh batch of Schell’s Framboise du Nord Berliner Weisse was a thrilling surprise (as was the report from the staff there that Starkeller Peach will probably be re-brewed too), but bar none, my best sour beer of the day was the very first pour from what Surly said was the last keg of the original brewing of Five, its sour dark ale released back in 2011. This beer is a deep emotional memory of mine, formative in my love of sours, and I was over the moon at being able to enjoy it one last time.
If there’s one thing that the hazy New England IPA trend has done right, it’s that hoppy beers are a lot more drinkable in festival environments now, with less palate fatigue. 4 Hands’ tropical fruited Super Flare IPA is a St. Louis classic, and delicious. Toppling Goliath just bottled a batch of Supa Sumo -- citra-heavy King Sue dry-hopped with a bunch of Mosaic hops -- and the keg they poured at Great Taste lived up to all hype.
Two oddballs that I have to mention because they’re subtle styles with only the slightest adjunct novelty: Right Brain Cake Walk and Corridor $100 Yoga Pants. Right Brain has done nice work with other adjunct beers like Cherry Pie Whole and Thai Peanut, so my expectation for Cake Walk was for a fun throwaway beer. It’s just a cream ale with vanilla, but the base beer is so nicely made that the vanilla actually adds value rather than attempting to obscure any flaws.
$100 Yoga Pants got some pre-event publicity for its goofy name, but the beer turned out to be a supremely refreshing and crisp blonde ale with enough cucumber to register as a spa water reference. It was the kind of beer I could have spent the whole afternoon drinking in the sun. If I didn’t have all those wacky-ass stouts to drink, too, I mean.
